Tuesday, 3 July 2012

MPs desperate to appear virtuous

If you can subdue the sour vomitous gorge rising in your throat at the sheer audacious hypocrisy of it, watch Diamond appearing before a Commons select committee this week as MPs tumble over themselves to condemn fraud, corruption and greed in a desperate attempt to appear virtuous; the loudest parliamentary critics of Barclays, as Littlejohn points out in the Mail, are often the members themselves bent as a Geller spoon;

Expenses Bandit Ed Balls and his hatchet-faced wife pretended their house in London, where they spend most of their time and where their children go to school, was their ‘second home’. Former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling ‘flipped’ his address four times, not only to force taxpayers to meet the bulk of his household bills, but to avoid Capital Gains Tax when he sold up. And he was in charge of the Treasury at the time. These are the same people who presided over the deliberately lax regulation of the financial sector which encouraged rogue bankers to believe they could get away with blue murder.

Then, of course, there was the former Home Secretary, ‘Jackboots’ Jacqui Smith, who banked £100,000 falsely claiming that her sister’s spare bedroom in South London was her ‘main’ home. You might have thought she’d be keeping her head down in the circumstances. But Jackboots has been turning up on TV newspaper reviews condemning the bankers, just as Balls and Darling have been leading the charge against tax-avoiders.

Never mind the bent bankers, we're still waiting for scores of bent MPs to lift their snouts from the public trough.

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

This has had me wondering all the time. And also you hear from these bent bastard politicians about "morally repugnant" people who avoid tax with legal loopholes. Who the hell are they to condemn anyone? 500 out of the 660 MPs fiddled their expenses; some more so than others. How many were brought before a court? How many went to jail? How many lost their jobs?

Now on to LIBOR. I will concede right now that my knowledge of this may be lacking but... London Interbank Offer Rate. Isn't this the rate that banks lend to each other day by day? So if this is based on some sort of supply / demand, then surely a rate is agreed upon at the time; or "rigged" as we now have it. Could it possibly be those nasty politicians are trying desperately to avert our angry gaze from themselves to another institution? Just a thought.

I hope Bob the Rob, who has now fallen on his own sword - and dishes the dirt on MacBruin and his cohorts.

There was panic at the time [2007/8] and Barclays was in the middle of it - frantically trying to stave off a taxpayer bail-out, it ran to the Arabs.Lying about its LIBOR rate, was par. Barclays, were in big trouble and the Treasury must have known, that he bank were they in league with the LIBOR fixers? Of course they were, it was desperate stuff and Brown fixed it so that Banks like Barclays could remain in the game, just. Barclays Bank, is still not out of the woods in any sense, its books are still piled high with euro debt where it is vastly overextended and elsewhere up to its neck in dodgy financial loan deals to all and sundry.

Let us not forget, Barclays had big South Africa links to the once Apartheid state, the bank's history has long been associated with nefarious banking activity.

They, Barclays are no paragons of financial virtue - but then which bank is?

I have suggested previously two actions that would cause politicians to pause and think hard:

1. Remove most of your money from chequing and savings account, leaving a minimum so as to inconvenience the bank.2. Appear at your police station and request a shotgun ownership certificate application (it is understood this is for sporting purposes)

Good thinking, Cascadian. We could do with a bit more like that ... but perhaps it's in the offing (just a little North-west of York :)

Mind you, we have to be careful. What with armed militia and all; the euro one being already in existence. While the political-economic crisis provides our Masters with power-grasping opportunities, so would descent into violence. That's one of the prinicples outlined by Bezmenov. The idea is that they'd then claim the right to "normalize" us under military rule.

anon2, ownership of the shotgun is for sporting purposes, the fact it is a multi-purpose tool is incidental, an armed citizenry is more difficult to "normalize", politicians have to consider that before enforcing tyrannical laws

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."...Thomas Jefferson